Key differences between PDQ Inventory Pro and AA Console

A natural and fully expected question that we have been hearing goes something like this: “What are the differences between PDQ Inventory and my current AA Console?”

We’ll start with some major differences.(note, some features exist only in the Pro enabled version of PDQ Inventory)

File Scanner – PDQ Inventory Pro enables you to define directories and file types that you want scanned. If you want to keep tabs on all of your .exe files that exist under C:\Program Files then you simply create a new Scan Profile and define the path and file type. Voila! A file scanner tracks file dates, size, name and all the header information (version, company, etc)

Registry Scanner – Already discussed in some earlier posts. Basically, you can collect registry configuration settings by defining different Registry paths that you want scanned

No more reliance on remote WMI connection – This was a big decision for us. AA Console depends on being able to access the WMI repository on all target systems via DCOM. There were a lot of hurdles to get through to properly configure this ability to access WMI remotely. Note, while PDQ Inventory still references the WMI repository to obtain certain inventory data (such as O/S, Windows Shares, etc) it does not, like AA Console, have to get it remotely via DCOM.

Improved database. AA Console utilizes Microsoft SQL Server CE (Compact Edition). This version of SQL is very prone to corruption and is rather difficult to access via other SQL reporting tools. PDQ Inventory utilizes SQLite which is not nearly as prone to corruption, can be easily accessed via ODBC and is simply more scalable than SQL CE. (See Adam’s previous post about access the PDQ Inventory DB via Microsoft Access)

No longer reliant on Active Directory. In AA Console all managed computers had to be a member of an Active Directory domain. With PDQ Inventory that is no longer the case.

Scan Profiles – with AA Console you effectively had two types of scanners. One for heartbeat (was the computer online, who was logged on, etc) and the other for, well, everything else. With PDQ Inventory you can break your inventory scanners down to very specific elements. Suppose you want to scan the Environment variables all of your target computers every hour but you only wanted to scan for Windows Shares every week. With PDQ Inventory Pro you can easily do this.

Obviously the ability to deploy software is contained in the PDQ Deploy application. PDQ Inventory and PDQ Deploy are separate products but can be integrated to leverage each other’s strengths. For example you can deploy software from PDQ Deploy via PDQ Inventory.

One feature in AA Console that is not available in PDQ Deploy or PDQ Inventory is Monitoring. We are discussing providing a monitoring tool outside of AA Console but we have not, at this writing, made a decision.

Our public beta of PDQ Inventory Pro is winding down. Thank you to all of you who have submitted feature requests, bug reports, complaints and thinly-veiled death threats.